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January 24, 2012

There's a devotional I read every day that has a pretty good track record of making me think. But a couple or three days ago, it presented me with a question that I haven't stopped thinking about. So I thought I'd share it here, because, well, because I think it's worth thinking about, and I think you will, too.

Apparentley, in the early days of NASA's manned flight program, they wanted to make sure that people who were going up into space had their heads on straight. So they asked all potential astronauts to give, not one, but 20 honest answers to the following question: Who are you?

Once the answers were compiled, there was a followup question: Are you who you thought you were?

October 05, 2011

My parents raised me in a fairly religious Methodist home. They sent me to a very religious not-Methodist school. By the time I escaped to college, I thought I'd had enough religion. As religion goes, anyway. I still thought about religion, but only in the abstract: an anthropological artifact to be incorporated into writing or art. I knew a lot about it, after all. Or at least I thought I did. I liked the imagery. I'd had so much of it shoved into my brain it was bound to find a way into my subconscious. The thought of going to church wasn't one that occurred to me, though. Unless I was home on vacation, in which case, church was obligatory.

If you knew me in my 20s and 30s, you knew a wild dude. Responsive, responsible, and successful if it had anything to do with work. But way off the hook if it didn't. I climbed ladders fast, shifted ladders even faster, and then hit the big bouncy spring that shoots Mario way, way, way high in the sky for lots of gold rings. I squashed a bunch of people along the way - two marriages, and lots of friends. Basically, I was a self-serving asshole. I can still be an asshole, today, I suppose. But definitely not the same kind, nor of the same magnitude.

To say my kids settled me down and got me back into church is too common, too easy, and inaccurate. I got back into church when my kids went to a Methodist preschool and the pastor cornered me about doing some advertising for the church. That was 7 or 8 years ago. Like the typography and design, the thoughts in the ads are a bit dated. I'm still not much of a typographer. My thoughts about church, however, have progressed since then. Enough that I now know it was God who settled me down and got me back into church. He just used my kids and some print ads to start the process.

Fast-forward through the next six-or-seven-ish years and you'll find a lot of typical stuff experienced, I think, by typical half- to three-quarter-hearted Christians. Regular church attendance, a little thought given to the sermon, but only if I found it too political; some fumbling with questions from the kids about stuff they learned in Sunday school. A lot of doubt that gets muffled by respectable habits. Trying, but not too hard. Trusting, but not too much. Faith, hope, and a paid-up insurance policy.

Sometimes you don't see stuff clearly when it's happening. Forest, trees, etc. It's only in retrospect that you begin to recognize patterns. In retrospect, I recognize a pattern made up of a bunch of giant arrows that said in no uncertain terms: This Way. That way led me and my family out of (literal and figurative) danger and into safety multiple times. Eventually, it led down a road that went past a barbecue stand run by a church that turned into a movie I had to make.

I think Faith Hope and BBQ is going to be one of those films that appeals to different people for very different reasons. Religion as an anthropological artifact and/or a side dish with a slab of ribs. If you want to see it that way when it's finished, by all means, please do. You will not be disappointed, or feel preached at. You'll enjoy it, I promise. If you want to see it as more than character study, though, that's ok, too. Because I do. The process of making this film changed my character for the better.

I met people who trust God in a way, and have a faith, that I'd only read about. The experience of being around them has helped me rely more on faith. It has strengthened my relationship with Christ. And I hope it will help me see some of those big directional arrows God puts in front of all of us -- before they're reflections in the rear view mirror.

I'm not sure where the arrows point next. As we get closer to finishing Faith Hope and BBQ, I find myself hoping that they point toward more work like this. Entertaining, engaging, inspiring stories that appeal to different kinds of people, yet ultimately show the good things God brings into our lives. Kind of a long descriptor, I know. What I don't know is where that kind of work comes from. I've spent my career chasing tv commercials. I know where they come from, and plan to continue shooting all I possibly can. But that other kind of work - the kind with the long descriptor, and the inspirational messages attached...not a clue. If you know, let me know. If not, I guess I'll just have to keep an eye out for the right kind of sign along the road.

September 19, 2011

There's a point in every project, whether it's a 30-second spot, a 3-minute music video, or a feature film, where the thing goes from a bunch of select shots and logged footage, piles of script notes, ideas jotted down on scrap paper, and random sequence chunks that may or may not work together -- to a cohesive thing that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

It's not finished, by a long shot. It has a ways to go. But the bones are there. It has structure. It's definitely a movie. And it's incredibly fun to watch. Running time right now is a bit more than an hour; you're entertained the whole time by a wonderful cast of characters; and when it's all said and done, you feel two things: uplifted, and hungry.

August 10, 2011

There's always a backstory, no matter what you do When you decide to make a film, though, you at least hope for a good one. This one, in particular, is pretty good, I think. I'm re-posting here on erniemosteller.com because this blog has a slightly different audience than some of the other places I post. So if you've read this already, my apologies. If you haven't read it, it's the story of how and why I came to begin making Faith Hope and BBQ, the documentary we hope to release sometime this fall. Still moving along in the overall edit of the film -- if you haven't seen the trailer, you should check it out at faithhopebbq.com. In the meantime, here's how the whole thing came to be, reposted from the site:

From the Director: The Backstory

This little film wasn’t just an opportunity for me. It was a calling. The story behind how it came to be, I think, is interesting. And it’s something I feel compelled to tell.

Growing up on a farm in a part of Florida that’s more 4×4, college football and Sunday church than it is poolside cabanas or theme parks, I have a deep appreciation for the small-town and rural South. I love the people, I love the culture, and I love the food. It’s almost impossible for me not to turn into a roadside boiled peanut stand, or an off-the-beaten-path barbecue joint, when I drive country roads. After living for years in places like Miami, New York, Vancouver, Houston, and DC, I had the opportunity to move my family back to the general area where I grew up. I direct things all over the country, so I can kind of live anywhere there’s an accessible airport. I figure, I might as well live in a place I love. It’s a great place for my kids, especially because they get to spend plenty of time on the farm with my mom and dad. And it’s a wonderful place to come home to after I’ve been on the road shooting a long project.

The drive from my home to my parents’ place, which was my home as a kid, is about 30 miles. It takes me down country roads through the middle of a swampy state forest where I did a lot of camping and canoeing as a teenager. It also goes through a couple of tiny little towns — you know the kind — a convenience store or two, a small engine repair place, a bait shop, and several churches. I know the road well, because it was one of two ways to the beach when I was a kid.

I passed by New Hope a hundred times before I got the opportunity to stop. Not that I didn’t want to. It’s just that the only reason for me to drive that road these days is to go to my parents’ house. I almost always have the kids with me, and we’re almost always going for dinner, or coming home after. Not good to show up to Grandma’s house for her home-cooked meal after you’ve filled up at the barbecue joint. And the barbecue, like many small barbecues, is only open a couple days a week. So I wanted to stop, but I didn’t get the chance for a long time.

At first, I wasn’t sure whether the barbecue was connected to the church. The smoke shack is under a big tree on the far end of a dirt parking lot that I now know is church property. But from the road, without the signage Scotty recently put up, you could have easily thought it was just near the church, not connected to it. That is, unless you stopped and talked to Scotty, of course. Driving past so many times, and wanting to stop, but not being able to, I began to write a narrative in my head about this guy out there with the barbecue shack under the tree.

“I bet he’s got good ribs,” I’d say to myself. ”It’s always those guys in the parking lots who make the best ribs.”

“You know what?” I’d ramble on in my head, “I bet that barbecue supports that church. Probably a tiny little congregation that can’t raise a lot of money. I bet they’re selling barbecue to help out. And you know what else? I betcha that guy out there cooking is the Preacher. And…wait a minute…wasn’t that church on the other side of the road a long time ago?”

I finally got frustrated just driving by, so one day when I had a little free time around lunch, I made a special trip, just for a rib sandwich. I came away with a lot more than that. Scotty’s food is about as good as I’ve ever had — and I’ve eaten a lot of barbecue. In true barbecue-man fashion, he won’t talk in detail about his recipes or his cooking techniques. But he will talk with you about life, and faith, and God, and how the New Hope Barbecue came to be. And as it turns out, every part of the narrative I’d heard in my own head is true. Now, you might say that an observant person with some knowledge of rural Southern culture might come to the same narrative I did without ever stopping the truck — and you’d be right. And the notion of a church running a side business to help raise money isn’t anything unusual, really. But this was different, and I knew it right away.

Conversation with Scotty flows freely from subject to subject. One minute, he can be discussing the ongoing theological arguments over some point of Christian doctrine, the next minute he’s segued into the practical matters of being a country preacher with a small congregation, or the struggles facing all small churches in America. The very next minute he’s warning you not to cut your marinating short – especially with pork butts. That takes time.

If you buy some barbecue, you’ll pick it up in the kitchen in the back of the church building, where it’s been kept at optimal warming temperature since it came off the smoker. They follow the state health codes to the letter at New Hope. In the kitchen, you’ll meet Mattie, Scotty’s mom, the church’s Sunday School teacher, and maker of some of the best sweet potato pie I’ve ever tasted. Like Scotty, Mattie is tight-lipped when it comes to her recipes. But she showers anyone who enters the door with blessings, praise, thanks, and kind words. For most people, the food, plus interaction with either Scotty or Mattie, is enough to get you back. The more I talked with Scotty and Mattie, and the more people connected with New Hope I met, the more I realized I had to make a film.

The people of New Hope are genuine, they’re characters on film with true character in life. To a person, they are driven by the kind of unwavering faith you simply do not see every day. I was raised going to church on Sunday. I go to church now. And while my parents and both grandmothers worked hard to instill faith in me, for some reason it didn’t take root the way they hoped. Even now, as a Christian, I struggle with faith. But my experience making this little short documentary showed me how powerful strong faith can be in those who maintain it. It made me want to find ways to strengthen my own faith. But as Scotty will tell you, emphatically, over and over, and over again….faith without works…does no good. At New Hope, though, that’s not a problem. I’ve never in my life seen a group of people who all work so hard — in concert — for what many of us might see as a small reward. They work hard because they believe unfailingly in their mission, and in their church. They work hard because they have faith that it will do some good.

It’s just a short little documentary, still work in progress. I hope it’s entertaining. I think it will be, because the people I put on camera certainly are entertaining. They’re a bit quirky, how they seamlessly blend themes of God and community and Spirit with a deep knowledge and appreciation for meat on a smoker. Their energy is infectious. Their work ethic is admirable, and their faith is certainly strong. On top of all that, they’re fun to be around. I’m thankful — to them, and to God — that I got the opportunity to know them, and introduce them to you.